Alchemist Guild

[teelaurila]

Although it is based only on two games I've played with 5.11, it seems the change of alchemy guild has made alchemist really strong now. Not only do you not have to build the guild, you don't have to pay for it. Previously at least the guild essentially paid for itself.

Also the alchemy guild is a bit off in that it has library - a resource building - as prereq. With (most) everything else, you choose between resources and military.

[Nelphine]

Amplifying tower is the MOST important economic building, by a large margin. The Alchemist guild is far more important as a prerequisite to the amplifying tower. Its military potential is icing.

[Seravy]

Well, paying for itself isn't really relevant for something you only want in a few military production centers (or after you can afford amplifying towers) so that's not a very big deal and military buildings producing magic power is a bad idea I think, even worse than research. However with early power availability improved and the power/gold/research balance fixed, the conversion part of Alchemy should be a lot less powerful than before in exchange.
Also, the building no longer paying itself means building it where it's not necessary is now an actual bad choice instead of one that doesn't really matter. This makes the relevance of magic weapons and weapon immunity somewhat larger, despite the lower production cost of the building.

I decided to keep the library requirement because I do not want people to end up having zero research empires and then complain the research system is now too expensive because they are used to the old one where you could research your stuff from your power base alone - research buildings are a lot more important now as they are almost twice as effective as building power buildings and using those to research. (also because dropping the requirement would be a problem with Barbarians who already exhausted all the slots on their prohibited building list.)
Picking Alchemy still allows skipping the Library, and it's a retort you want for high difficulty military strategies anyway, so where not building libraries was a good tactic, you can still do so without losing anything.

Also, the requirement makes sense - you need magical weapons against magical creatures or spells, so research being required for both is reasonable. (It's also more AI friendly - overly military AI won't end up having zero research and losing to that - while it's not much, they'll at least have a lot of libraries built.)

[teelaurila]

Good points all. Seems like I overextended my military production to too many cities anyways, and had some serious resource issues for a while.

At what stage do you go for Amplifiers? I've been feeling like the game is practically over before I get there. Read some analysis that it's around 150-200 skill that it starts to be beneficial to use amplifiers instead of putting points to skill.

[Nelphine]

Military is more important, so you need to get your military going first. That being said I usually have.my first between 1406 and 1408. By 1411-1412 I'm consistently buying them with gold as long as I have a slush fund to pour into military if needed.

At 100 skill, it would cost 201 power to raise skill by 1. So 1419 power to raise by 7. If you don't have alchemy, that means 2838 gold - far more than the cost of an amp tower.

Without alchemy it's actually somewhere between 60-65 to break even on spending the gold to buy the tower or convert it into mana in order to allow more power to be sent on skill. With Alchemy it's close to 125. Oh but there's also maintenance plus the cost of the alchemist guild (since it's effectively just extra cost to amp tower. So it's more like 80 without alcemy and 160 with alchemy. Might be a little higher.

However, amp tower are the only way to increase skill directly with gold. So as soon as you have 0 power set to mana (and expect to maintain that) amp towers are always worth it. (Note, with thousands of mana added from the gold of one, you might find yourself converting to mana with the gold for one tower, which allows setting mana to 0, so using the next batch of gold to immediately buy the tower anyway). This usually only happens if you foresee peace for the next few years.

[Seravy]

As far as I remember the calculation I did was for comparing AT with Wizard's Guild. At a certain amount of skill (maybe ~100?) it becomes more profitable to build the At instead of building the cheaper WG and using the power production from that to raise skill.
However, this assumes you can build both. If you already have your wizard's guild in a city and still want to raise skill more, amplifying tower is the next best option to do that. Whether this is a better thing to do than to spend that production on units or military buildings or banks etc,figuring that out is what playing the game is about. But if you know you need skill more than anything else, then do wizard's guild first, amplifying next if your skill is low, AT first WG next if high. In general, WG first is always better on the long term...but at high enough skill that long term can be more than the entire remaining game. WG is a net positive, for each turn you gain a profit. AT is net negative, for each turn you pay maintenance and gain nothing, except the initial 7 skill. So it's like a loan, either the 7 casting skill will let you cast something that pays the maintenance (or conquers cities that do so) or it's a net loss.